A portfolio of 22 Hand-Painted Screen-prints, accompanied by an original artwork executed by the artist, Farideh Lashai.

First launched at Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai

Shown at Art Dubai 2016

In Iran, like in many other Eastern lands the contemporary artist is dragged into two conventionally opposite directions. One direction tilts towards familiar footprints that lead to a buried but glorious past, a sense of nostalgia, fear and disgust with the mechanization and shallowness of the presently emerging culture. The other direction is an impulse of aspiration to detach from the past and to reconcile with a present that emerges in a nanosecond demolishing the previous nanosecond. In this condition of oscillation between an Oriental nostalgia and thinking in terms of nanoseconds and micro-chips, an artist such as Farideh Lashai, is able to explore her historical memory as an Iranian, in miniature sized images of a cypress tree that is reprinted thousands of times and to reconcile it with an invitation to detachment, liminal spaces, and ephemeral moments. The openness of the work invites the viewer to engage in a similar oscillation between the different senses that the work induces.

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The Waste Land, 1922

T.S. Eliot

Farideh has always been interested in referencing great master-pieces in art history in her artwork. The two body of work that are currently on exhibition at Edward Tyler Nahem, New York and at Leila Heller Gallery, New York are all referencing other works: “Her landscapes became the background for stop-motion animations inspired by the

iconography of familiar paintings, films, or books (Goya’s The Disasters of War, Chaplin’s The

Great Dictator, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). The projections turn her abstract

landscapes into stage sets where human actors are present only as ghostly props. They are

brave and surprisingly specific political metaphors, a completely new visual experiment begun in the fifth decade of her career.” 1

She has always been interested in stages, and the backdrop of an act. Which one is more important? And how does an action, an event, atrocity, war, change a place? How would you feel seeing these series of intaglio prints if you were not familiar with Goya’s work, if the name is omitted, if you did not have The Disasters of War as a reference point? Would these landscapes still carry the weight of war and atrocity that is so embedded in our collective memory? The whole work is about humanity’s collective memory and historical memory and how that will inform our new experiences of the same, of war in new geographical spaces at other times. In the Middle East we have experienced it first hand very recently.

She had been fascinated with Goya’s work from her youth and Goya’s work has been a point of departure for many contemporary artists. The Disasters of War is a body of work that is instrumental in the formation of an artists understanding of Modernity in art.